


Social Experiments

by RoseAngel



Series: The Red Thread [27]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, First Meetings, Gen, Prompt Fic, Psychology, Social Experiments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-05 23:58:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14629737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseAngel/pseuds/RoseAngel
Summary: An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break. - Ancient Chinese beliefA series of alternate ways that John and Sherlock could have met. PROMPT FIC.Prompt #27: Sherlock starts a club as a cover for a social experiment. John is the only one who realizes his motivations, OR, John is the only one who shows up.





	Social Experiments

**Author's Note:**

> A million thanks to the world's most brilliant beta, Becca (LlamaWithAPen).
> 
> Today's prompt comes from FanFiction.Net guest user autocorrect.

The chairs in the common room are grouped into small circles – three to six chairs to a group. The desks have been pushed to the side, out of the way, with the exception of five desks that have been set up in a row at the front. Tins of biscuits, bowls of chips, plates of cupcakes and cans of soft drink are spread out in a junk food feast. The room looks set up for a party, ready to cater for at least two dozen people.

Total number of people in the room: one.

The single person in the room is a first-year university student by the name of Sherlock Holmes, and Sherlock Holmes is responsible for the set-up of the room as previously described. Sherlock Holmes is a tall, lanky young man in his early twenties, with dark curls and bright eyes and a dissatisfied expression on his face.

You might think, based on this, that Sherlock Holmes is a social individual. You might think that he is extroverted, in that he finds pleasure through the interaction with other people, and he enjoys parties and gatherings such as the one for which this room seems to be prepared. You would think wrong. Sherlock Holmes is not extroverted. Quite the opposite – he almost always chooses to work alone or spend time alone, and he does not enjoy spending time with other people. He finds the topics that interest most of his peers dull, and he finds the speed at which their minds work frustrating, because interacting with other people means slowing himself down to give them time to catch up, which is a waste of his time and his energy. Sherlock does not crave social interaction like an extroverted individual might, and he does not find social interaction enjoyable.

Why, then, would a person like Sherlock Holmes have gone to the effort of rearranging the furniture in one of the classrooms, and setting out plates of food for a social gathering?

The answer is simple: it was for an experiment.

When Sherlock had first enrolled in his classes at the beginning of the year, he had been one course short. The number of chemistry classes that were offered to first-year students did not fill up the requisite number of courses for a full-time work load. In the interest of not unnecessarily extending his degree by a semester to make up for the one course that he missed in his first year, Sherlock opted to take an additional course outside his area of interest (chemistry). He chose a course that was still science-based (because Sherlock thought he might pull his hair out if he tried an arts course), and one particular science-based course offered a course schedule that was compatible with the courses in which Sherlock had already enrolled: psychology.

This was the reason Sherlock initially chose to take a first-year psychology course. The hours were compatible with his timetable, and it would be less subjective than an arts course (even though it would be more subjective than the kind of hard sciences that Sherlock was used to). Sherlock didn't really expect to enjoy the course – he just thought it would be one that he would force his way through until the semester finally finished, at which point he could fill up his timetable exclusively with chemistry courses. To Sherlock's surprise, however, the psychology course ended up being one of Sherlock's favourites. Sherlock's plan for the future is to become a consulting detective – a career path he invented himself, because being a normal detective, who has to investigate cases even when they're boring, and who has to do paperwork, doesn't interest him at all. While the classic psychological experiments and theories covered in the course were far more abstract than anything that Sherlock would deal with in his future career, he could still see how the topics were related. He could see how some of the theories they covered in class explained human behaviour, and how it might explain the actions of criminals that Sherlock would one day put behind bars. Importantly, also, Sherlock found the course interesting – which was impressive, seeing as Sherlock has always been very picky about what he allows to remain in his head and occupy his attention.

Now, for some students (for a great many students, in fact), what they do in class is enough. They might find a subject interesting, but they are content to learn about it by attending lectures or doing the required readings, or maybe even going a little bit above and beyond and doing some readings in their own time. Sherlock, however, is not like most people. He isn't willing to take someone else's words, to trust everything he reads and be satisfied that that's enough. When something interests Sherlock, he wants to know everything that there is to know about it, and he isn't willing to trust someone else's claims – not when there is an alternative.

Peer-reviewed journals might be reliable sources, but that does not mean that the authors are without bias. Just because something isn't a lie doesn't mean it tells the whole story, either. This is why Sherlock's kitchen tends to resemble a laboratory at the best of times – why should Sherlock trust the research that he reads about when an experiment is simple enough to replicate? Not only does that give Sherlock the opportunity to test someone else's claims, but it's also something he finds interesting, even enjoyable. That, and often the process of replicating an experiment sparks ideas and inspiration for other experiments, maybe even things that no one else has tried.

Up until now, all of the experiments that Sherlock has conducted have been related to chemistry. Now, however, Sherlock has other sorts of ideas, other sources of inspiration for other kinds of experiments. Psychology is just another science; human beings are just another sort of variable. If anything, psychological experiments need replicating even more so than chemistry experiments, because human beings can be remarkably changeable at the best of times.

There are some psychological experiments that Sherlock knows he could never replicate. For some, he does not have the resources – he does not have access, for instance, to EEGs or fMRIs or the precise sets of visual stimuli used in perceptual experiments. In other cases, Sherlock could not replicate particular experiments because of the ethical issues associated with them – such as the Little Albert experiment, where the researchers conditioned an infant to fear fluffy, white objects by making a loud noise behind his head every time he was exposed to a white rat. (Sherlock could not replicate the Little Albert experiment both because there were now rules around the ethical considerations of psychological research and also because he doubted anyone would be willing to lend him their baby for science). However, there are a number of psychological experiments that Sherlock can try to replicate, and a number of theories and phenomena that Sherlock can test, with the only necessary resource being the participants themselves.

This is the reason why Sherlock tried to start a social club – not for the enjoyment, not for the company, but because Sherlock needed a way to get participants for his experiments. Up until perhaps an hour ago, Sherlock believed that the idea was a genius one. Students on campus were willing to pay for membership to social clubs, purely so that they could go to events or have access to a certain common room on campus. Surely that meant that they would be more than willing to come to Sherlock's club, for which they did not need to pay. Sherlock had even promised them free food, because nothing gets a university student out of bed like the promise of free food.

Sherlock had carefully considered everything. He had spent time creating a poster that looked similar enough to the posters for other social clubs to be believable, while still standing out enough to get people's attention. He had studied the university timetabling website, to work out what timeslot would mean that the maximum number of people were on campus (so, not early morning and not late evening) but also that had the minimum number of classes running (he had made sure that the classes that were running were primarily drama classes, because actors probably were not the ideal participant for a social experiment, unless Sherlock detailed how he wanted them to act). He had made sure that the time did not clash with any of the other major clubs' meetings. He had chosen a room on campus that was fairly central, so no one would have to go searching the far ends of the university to find it. In a nutshell, he had done everything right.

And yet, it didn't work. Sherlock has been waiting there in the room he booked for over an hour now. He booked the room for the whole afternoon – once his participants arrived, he wanted to have as much time as possible to study their interactions. Having the entire afternoon set aside also meant that people who had classes that clashed with the start of the meeting time could turn up later. This way, Sherlock could maximise the number of potential participants that could come to his meeting.

Sherlock hadn't been worried when no one turned up on time. These were university students he was dealing with. University students were almost never on time for anything. Now that it has been over an hour, however, Sherlock is worried. No, not worried – frustrated. Sherlock is frustrated because he has now given people enough time to turn up even if they were running late, or even if they had classes first, or even if they just didn't like the idea of being on time and risking being the first to arrive. It's been over an hour. It's safe to assume by now that no one is going to turn up.

Frustrated, Sherlock storms to the open front door that leads out into the courtyard, where he had taped another copy of his poster, so that people knew they had come to the right room. That was another thing that Sherlock has taken into consideration – and another waste of time. He snatches the poster off the door and takes his anger out on it by crumpling it into a ball and hurling it across the courtyard.

Or, at least, Sherlock tries to hurl the crumpled up poster across the courtyard. However, he does not look before he takes aim and throws with all his might. Had he looked first, he would have noticed the young man who was standing in the courtyard, right where Sherlock throws the poster.

One possible course of action that could have followed is that the poster could have hit the man in the head, which would not cause any sort of injury but, with most people, would lead to anger that may then be taken out on Sherlock. Sherlock is no stranger to harsh words or the occasional physical display of hatred. Fortunately for Sherlock, this is not the situation that plays out. With impressive reflexes, the man in the courtyard raises one hand and catches the crumpled poster before it can hit him in the face. When he looks up to meet Sherlock's eyes, the expression on his face is not one of annoyance or anger. If anything, he looks amused.

"You realise there's a rubbish bin inside the room, right?" the young man says amicably.

"I wasn't aiming for the bin," Sherlock mutters.

"Clearly," says the man. "Were you aiming to take my eye out?"

"A piece of paper is hardly likely to cause severe enough an injury to blind you," says Sherlock, "but regardless, that was not my intention either."

As he speaks, the man unfolds the poster, eyes skimming over it briefly before looking back up at Sherlock again. "So you were just taking out your frustrations on the poor, unsuspecting poster, were you?"

Sherlock opts to not comment on the descriptors that preceded the poster in that sentence, and instead just mutters, "Something like that."

He turns to head back into the room, thinking that turning his back is probably a good way to bring the conversation to a close, but the man is, apparently, not quite deterred yet. He follows Sherlock up to the doorway, and tosses the crumpled up poster inside – where it lands perfectly in the wastepaper basket. When that is done, the man leans sideways against the doorframe. Out of the corner of his eyes, Sherlock can see the man looking at the feast that Sherlock has set out at the front of the room.

"I think you bought too much food," the man says after a moment.

"I prepared exactly the correct amount of food for the amount of people I anticipated turning up," Sherlock says tightly.

"Ah," the man says, as though the spoken sentence has shed light on something for him. "That explains your frustration and the fact that you tried to take my eye out with a poster."

"I didn't try to take your eye out."

"Course not," says the man. After a beat, he asks, "Is all that food going to go to waste now?"

Sherlock chooses to answer the unspoken question lying beneath that sentence. "Help yourself," he says, and the man does just that, stepping into the room and picking up one of the paper plates. It's better that the man takes some of the food that Sherlock has set up for his failed attempt of a club. That way it feels like slightly less of a waste. Whatever is leftover is going straight into the bin anyway; Sherlock isn't going to eat any of it.

The man grabs a couple of biscuits and a cupcake, putting it onto his plate. Sherlock reaches for a biscuit himself; instead of eating it, he turns it over and examines it as though it holds the answer to all the questions that have filled his head over the past hour or so. After a moment, he says, "I thought university students were willing to do anything for free food."

The man smirks around a mouthful of cupcake. "Usually, they are," he says.

"Then why not come here?" Sherlock asks, not expecting a proper answer. "Why not join my club?"

"You mean your social experiment?" the man asks, and Sherlock's brain screeches to halt.

If the situations were reversed – if someone else, like this man, had set up a club and Sherlock was the one to turn up and view the poster, then Sherlock has no doubt that he would be able to tell that the social club was a fake, designed for a social experiment. Sherlock is smart. He's good at working out things about people that might not be immediately apparent to most people. This is what makes Sherlock different. That, of course, is the key word in that sentence – different. Sherlock is not used to other people being able to make the deductions that he makes, and certainly not when he himself cannot work out what it is that gave him away, what observation could have led to such a deduction.

He considers the layout of the room, but although the room had been carefully constructed to allow for small circles of social interaction for Sherlock to observe, the room does not look at all unusual for a common room or any other sort of club meeting room. He considers his poster, but Sherlock spent so much time crafting that poster so that it did not stand out from the other club posters as something  _not real_ , so Sherlock does not believe he missed anything there. In short, he does not know what the man before him has seen that gave away the fact that Sherlock's club is not a real club at all. The implication, of course, is that the man can see something Sherlock cannot, and that – that is frustrating.  _No one_  can see something that Sherlock can't.

(No one except perhaps Sherlock's brother, but that doesn't count.)

He doesn't want to admit defeat, but Sherlock has to know. Not knowing is worse than admitting defeat. Finally, he asks, "How can you tell?" and the man responds with a grin.

"Lucky guess," the man says, and Sherlock purses his lips in frustration, because that is not an answer – certainly not one that Sherlock is at all willing to accept.

"It can't just be a guess. Something put the idea in your mind, even if you were uncertain about it. What was it?"

The grin remains on the man's face. It seems to hold a number of different emotions in the expression. Sherlock can identify amusement and smugness, and something else, though he can't quite put his finger on it. "You're Sherlock Holmes," the man says at last, and this answer is even more frustrating than the first, because once again, it does not actually explain how the man came to his conclusion, and it  _also_  means that the man knows who Sherlock is, when Sherlock isn't sure he's ever seen the man before in his life.

Sherlock does not need to speak, to ask any of the questions that this non-response brings to his mind, because they must show on his face. The man almost seems to read his mind, answering the questions that never leave Sherlock's lips. "We're in the same psychology class," he says. "You've got a bit of a reputation, you know. I was surprised to see your name on a poster for what looked like a social event. I don't think I've ever seen you even spend time with people in class, let alone go to an event."

"And so you made the leap to conclude that I had designed a club for the mere purpose of a social experiment?"

The man smiles again. "Like I said, it was a lucky guess. Helps that I'm friends with Greg, though."

"Who?" Sherlock asks.

The man frowns at Sherlock's need for clarification. "Greg," he repeats. "Greg Lestrade, from psychology? I know you spend time with him sometimes."

That explains it. "Oh, Lestrade," Sherlock says, and then he frowns once again. "How does he come into this?"

"I've heard him talk about you before."

"Lestrade talks about me?"

"Everyone talks about you. That's kind of what I mean by you having a reputation. Anyway, Greg's had a few stories about you blowing up things in the chemistry lab whenever you're trying to do experiments. Given we're both taking psychology, it wasn't a huge leap to think that maybe this club, given how... out of character it seems for you, might be related to some sort of experiment as well."

Sherlock looks the man up and down, raising his eyebrows. After a long silence, he says, "You're smarter than you look." It makes the man laugh.

"Thank you, I think?" he says. "I can't work out if that's a compliment or an insult."

"It's neither," Sherlock says. After a beat, he asks, "You have me at something of a disadvantage. You know my name, but I don't know yours."

"No surprises there," the man says. "I don't have a reputation like you do. I'm John. John Watson."

"John Watson," Sherlock repeats. No wonder he did not know this man's name before now. Both 'John' and 'Watson' are remarkably common names, and until now, Sherlock has had no reason to save it in his mind. If he has ever met this man before, or heard his name, then Sherlock has, of course, dismissed him as unimportant and deleted him.

Sherlock won't delete him this time.

After a pause, Sherlock asks, "Is this the reason for my lack of success? Everyone managed to work out that this was nothing more than a social experiment?"

"I doubt it," John Watson says, pulling up a chair and sliding into it. This action is interesting, given the implications – if John is sitting, it may very well be because he is willing to stay for a little while, to continue this conversation. John continues, "I worked it out because I know you through Greg, and Greg knows that you like conducting experiments. I don't know if that would really be common knowledge." He pauses for a moment, hesitates, and then says, "Although – no offence – your reputation might be the reason why no one turned up."

Sherlock takes no offence in this. He knows he is not the most well-liked of people. Perhaps putting his own name on the flyer was the wrong idea.

A thought flies briefly through Sherlock's head – if he tried this again, he would know better than to put his name on the poster. That might be enough to bring more people to his club. However, if Sherlock was to ever try this again, not only would he have to remake the poster and go to all the effort he had put in this time around, to make sure that it was attention-grabbing while not looking like it was for a social experiment, but in addition, he would have to make it different enough to the poster that he made for this attempt, in case anyone recognises it and knows he is involved.

Tedious. Maybe he should just stick to chemicals. That's what he is used to, after all. People are far too complicated.

Sherlock realises halfway through this thought process that John is talking. He manages to tune in just in time to catch the end of John's sentence: "—to do?"

"Hmm?"

"What were you going to do?" John repeats. "What was your experiment going to be about?"

"Experiments," Sherlock corrects. "Had enough people turned up, I would not have been conducting just one. To start off with, I was going to study the way you interacted naturally. That way I could form some sort of baseline, understand how you interacted with one another without any interventions from me. Then I could see the effects of my own manipulations. I was also intending to replicate some of the experiments we covered in class, and to see what minor changes to the methodology might do to the results, or simply to see if the results were the same with a different sample."

"What experiments?" John asks, and he's sitting on the edge of his seat, looking attentive and actually  _interested_  in what Sherlock has to say. This comes as a surprise, but certainly a good one. Although Sherlock is not a fan of spending time with people, he does actually enjoy talking – especially when it means he can talk about his experiments or his deductions and show off his intelligence. He's a show-off, that's what he does.

He slides into a seat across from John, and they launch into a lengthy discussion about many of the experiments that they have covered in class. While there is no way that John could be as clever as Sherlock is, John has been attending the same lectures as Sherlock, and so Sherlock does not need to slow himself down to explain context or describe any of the experiments. He can say words like  _Bandura's Bobo Doll Experiment_  or  _Asch's Line Study_ , and John knew exactly what he was talking about.

They lose time in conversations of several of the psychology experiments that they have covered in class, and the ways in which some of these experiments could be replicated or altered slightly, and what they thought it might do with the results. They debate the ethical consideration in Milgram's Obedience Studies, where Milgram led participants to believe that they were administering harmful electrical shocks to another person, just to see how far people were willing to go to do what they were told. They discuss the controversial findings of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, where Zimbardo assigned perfectly ordinary college boys to the roles of 'prisoners' and 'guards' to recreate a prison scenario, and had to cancel the experiment after only six days because the 'guards' became cruel and sadistic and continuing the study became unethical.

They bounce ideas off each other without realising that that is what they're doing, sentences gliding down different tracks, leading to ideas that they will likely never end up using, and yet it is enjoyable just to come up with them. They lose track of the time like that – or, at least, Sherlock does, and while they're talking, the frustration that came with his failed attempt at gathering participants fades away.

"You know," John says after they've talked through a few hypothetical experiments or replications, "You could actually do some of these experiments. Not in first year, but in a few years, if you do post-grad study or a research project course or something. You could actually try to replicate some of these."

"I don't intend to continue studying psychology into the future," Sherlock says. "It's interesting, but my primary interest lies in the hard sciences. I'm only taking this course because I had no other options this semester; from next semester onwards my schedule will consist entirely of chemistry-based courses."

"Oh," John says. "Really? Given you're so interested in it that you're actually trying to conduct an experiment in your own time, I was sure psychology was going to be at least a minor, if not a major."

Sherlock shakes his head. "No, I'm just doing this to pass the time. I didn't expect to find psychology as enjoying as I have. I thought it would be too... subjective."

"I get that," John says with a nod of his head. "It's kind of different to any other science course."

Sherlock looks him over briefly. "I gather you yourself are not majoring in psychology," he says, and John nods.

"Nope," he says. "I'm doing mostly biology and chemistry subjects as well. I'm doing medical science."

Sherlock tips his head to the side. "I didn't think I'd seen you in any of my chemistry or biology courses," he says.

John smirks. "You didn't think I was in your psychology class, either," he points out. "They're big classes, so I'm not surprised you don't know everyone who is in them. Plus, you seem to be the sort of person to ignore anything around you that you don't think is important."

It's not entirely accurate - Sherlock doesn't  _ignore_  the world around him, and is actually very observant. He just deletes anything he observes that he does not think is important. He has probably noticed John in his class before, but decided he wasn't worth remembering.

(That has changed, now. John is worth remembering now.)

Rather than explaining the way Sherlock's mind works, however, he simply says, "Something like that."

After a moment, John gets to his feet. "I better go – I do actually have class. Thanks for the food, though."

"Don't mention it," Sherlock says. "It would have gone to waste otherwise."

"Not going to save it and have another attempt at starting a club?"

"Certainly not any time soon," Sherlock said. "I'll go back to chemicals. At least they do what I expect them to do."

John's lips quirk up into a smile. "Fair point," he says. "I'll see you around, Sherlock. It was nice to properly meet you."

"You too," Sherlock replies, and he finds he means it.

At least something positive came out of his failed attempt of a club.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a psychology graduate (and a psychology nerd), and this fic was a particularly good excuse to just geek out about psychology experiments. All experiments mentioned in this fic are real experiments (yes, including the marvelously disturbing Little Albert experiment) and I am completely open to talking about them in more detail if anyone is interested.


End file.
